Take a look at the big picture of modern art, and Duchamp's role in it.

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

"You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition."

MARCEL DUCHAMP SYNOPSIS

Few artists can boast having changed the course of art history in the way that Marcel Duchamp did. Having assimilated the lessons of Cubism and Futurism, whose joint influence may be felt in his early paintings, he spearheaded the American Dada movement together with his friends and collaborators Picabia and Man Ray. By challenging the very notion of what is art, his first readymades sent shock waves across the art world that can still be felt today. Duchamp's ongoing preoccupation with the mechanisms of desire and human sexuality as well as his fondness for wordplay aligns his work with that of Surrealists, although he steadfastly refused to be affiliated with any specific artistic movement per se. In his insistence that art should be driven by ideas above all, Duchamp is generally considered to be the father of Conceptual art. His refusal to follow a conventional artistic path, matched only by a horror of repetition which accounts for the relatively small number of works Duchamp produced in the span of his short career, ultimately led to his withdrawal from the art world. In later years, Duchamp famously spent his time playing chess, even as he labored away in secret at his last enigmatic masterpiece, which was only unveiled after his death in 1968.

MARCEL DUCHAMP KEY IDEAS

Coined by Duchamp, the term "readymade" came to designate mass-produced everyday objects taken out of their usual context and promoted to the status of artworks by the mere choice of the artist. A performative act as much as a stylistic category, the readymade had far-reaching implications for what can legitimately be considered an object of art.

Duchamp rejected purely visual or what he dubbed "retinal pleasure," deeming it to be facile, in favor of more intellectual, concept-driven approaches to art-making and, for that matter, viewing. He remained committed, however, to the study of perspective and optics which underpins his experiments with kinetic devices, reflecting an ongoing concern with the representation of motion and machines common to Futurist and Surrealist artists at the time.

A taste for jokes, tongue-in-cheek wit and subversive humor, rife with sexual innuendoes, characterizes Duchamp's work and makes for much of its enjoyment. He fashioned puns out of everyday expressions which he conveyed through visual means. The linguistic dimension of his work in particular paved the way for Conceptual art.

MOST IMPORTANT ART

Nude Descending A Staircase (1912)

Nude Descending A Staircase initially met with an unfavorable response at the Salon des Indépendants, dominated by the Cubist avant-garde who objected to what they deemed as its Futurist leanings, but enjoyed a succes de scandale at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. More than a study of the body's movement through space, the work is an early figurative exercise in painting cinematically, akin to Eadweard Muybridge's sequences of photographs that anticipated motion pictures. This painting together with the contemporaneous Passage from Virgin to Bride marks the end of Duchamp's short-lived career as a painter.

Art takes on a scientific guise in this intricate piece whose several component parts are neatly displayed alongside or slotted into a bespoke wooden case. To make this piece, which reads like a visual demonstration of the workings of chance, Duchamp dropped three threads, each exactly one meter long, from a height of one meter. He then carefully recorded the random outline of the fallen thread on canvas, glass and wood. Chance also dictated his choice of title: Duchamp apparently hit upon stoppages, French for the "invisible mending" of a garment, after walking past a shop sign advertising sewing supplies.

Mixed media - The Museum of Modern Art

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass (1915-1923)

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass was partly inspired by author Raymond Roussel's use of homophones, words that sound alike but have different meanings. Duchamp frequently resorted to puns and double-meanings in his work.With The Large Glass, he sought to make an artwork that could be both visually experienced and "read" as a text. After attending a performance of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique, Duchamp envisioned a sculptural assemblage as a stage of sorts. Preliminary studies for this stage, which would have been over nine feet tall, included depictions of an abstracted "bride" being attacked by machine-like figures in chaotic motion. The constructed gadgetry featured between the two glass panels was also likely inspired by Duchamp's study of mathematician Henri Poincare's physics theorems.

Mixed media - Philadelphia Museum of Art

Fountain (1917)

The most notorious of the readymades, Fountain was submitted to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists under the pseudonym R. Mutt. The initial R stood for Richard, French slang for "moneybags" whereas Mutt referred to JL Mott Ironworks, the New York-based company, which manufactured the porcelain urinal. After the work had been rejected by the Society on the grounds that it was immoral, critics who championed it disputed this claim, arguing that an object was invested with new significance when selected by an artist for display. Testing the limits of what constitutes a work of art, Fountain staked new grounds. What started off as an elaborate prank designed to poke fun at American avant-garde art, proved to be one of most influential artworks of the 20th century.

Urinal - Philadelphia Museum of Art

L.H.O.O.Q (1919)

Marcel Duchamp's scandalous L.H.O.O.Q is an altered postcard reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. For this "assisted" (which implied a degree of manipulation as opposed to the "unassisted") readymade, Duchamp penciled a moustache and a goatee over Mona Lisa's upper lip and chin, and re-titled the artwork. The title riffs on the French pronunciation of the letters, "Elle a chaud au cul," which roughly translates as "She has a hot ass." Rather than transmuting an ordinary, manufactured object into a work of art, as in the bulk of his readymades, in L.H.O.O.Q Duchamp starts with the representation of an iconic masterpiece that he takes down from its pedestal by playfully debunking it. In endowing the Mona Lisa with masculine attributes, he alludes to Leonardo's purported homosexuality and gestures at the androgynous nature of creativity. Duchamp is clearly concerned here with gender role-reversals, which later come to the fore in Man Ray's portraits of the artist dressed as his female alter ego, Rrose Selavy.

Collotype - Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Fresh Widow (1920)

This miniature model of a traditional French window was made to Duchamp's specifications by a carpenter in New York. The title, inscribed at the base along with the words "COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920," would have been an obvious pun in the aftermath of World War I, which turned many a lusty or "fresh" young spouse into a widow. (Incidentally, the work marks the debut of Duchamp's feminine alter ego, Rose Selavy.) As if to signal mourning, the eight windowpanes are covered in black polished leather, which fully blocks out the view, thus playing havoc with the notion of painting as a window onto the world.

Painted wood, glass, leather - Tate Modern, London

Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) (1925)

Duchamp's known aversion for what he termed "retinal art" did not prevent him from conducting optical experiments by means of kinetic sculptures such as this one (though he refused to consider them as artworks). Based on an earlier model Duchamp and Man Ray had experimented with in 1920, Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) consists of a white papier-mache globe mounted on a velvet-lined disk that calls to mind the rings of Saturn. The globe is covered with black concentric circles arranged to form a spiral that appears to pulsate when spinning. Engraved on a copper ring around the globe's circumference, the inscription "RROSE SELAVY ET MOI ESQUIVONS LES ECCHYMOSES DES ESQUIMAUX AUX MOTS EXQUIS," ("Rrose Selavy and I dodge the Eskimos' bruises with exquisite words.") When pronounced in French, the phrase wittily conveys the hypnotic visual effect verbally through a complex of echoing sounds.

Mixed media - The Museum of Modern Art

La Boite-en-Valise (Box in a Suitcase) (1935 - 1941)

Like a traveling salesman's kit, this Boite-en-Valise (Box in a Suitcase) is one of twenty-four editions of a leather case that contains sixty-nine miniature reproductions of Duchamp's artworks. Each box offered different, hand-colored art pieces affixed to the lid's inside. Sections in the boxes slide out and unfold to show prints mounted on black board. This work exemplifies the lack of boundary between original and reproduction that Duchamp developed with his readymades. The box also functions as a portable museum: Duchamp made it for his move to New York in 1942, and included selections of his work made up to that date. La Boite-en-Valise calls to mind André Malraux's "museum without walls," not least in its use of photographic reproductions.

Mixed media - Fogg Museum

Etant donnes (1946-66)

Installed behind a heavy wooden door that was found in Spain and shipped to New York, Etant donnes consists of a diorama viewed through two eyeholes. The scene depicts a nude woman, possibly dead, with her legs splayed, holding an illuminated gas lamp. A mountainous landscape, based on a photo Duchamp shot in Switzerland, creates the background setting. Built in secret over a period of more than twenty years, Etant donnes is considered Duchamp's second major work. He made an entire manual for its installation, which is reproduced in facsimile and available in print. At first glance, Etant donnes is a direct reference to Courbet's painting, Origine du Monde (1866). Yet upon closer consideration, the piece can be viewed as a reflection on the boundaries between artist and spectator, as a means to question self-consciousness, or as a meditation on spiritual purpose through the symbolism of a lit lamp.

Painted wood, latex, and fabric - Philadelphia Museum of Art

Priere de Toucher (Please Touch) (1947)

Priere de Toucher (Please Touch) was designed by Duchamp to accompany the seminal 1947 International Surrealist exhibition he co-curated with André Breton. For the limited edition of the exhibition catalogue, Duchamp and the Surrealist artist Enrico Donati hand-colored 999 foam rubber "falsies," or false breasts, to glue onto black velvet which adhered to the removable book covers. This catalogue, the exhibition it was based on, and a future exhibition on which Duchamp and Breton collaborated yet again, "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme (1959-60)," mark Duchamp's thematic overlap with the Surrealists, namely an obsession with eroticism.

MARCEL DUCHAMP BIOGRAPHY

Childhood

Marcel Duchamp was raised in Normandy, in a family of artists. His father was mayor of Blainville and his mother raised their seven children and painted landscapes depicting the French countryside. Family time was spent playing chess, reading, painting, and playing music. One of Marcel's earliest artworks, Landscape at Blainville (1902), painted at age fifteen, reflected his family's love of Claude Monet. Marcel was close to his two older brothers, and in 1904, after both had left home to become artists, he joined them in Paris to study painting at Académie Julian. His brother, Jacques Villon, supported him during his studies, and Marcel earned some income by working as a cartoonist. Duchamp's early drawings evince his ongoing interest in visual and verbal puns.

MORE

Early Training

Paris in the early 1900s was the ideal place for Duchamp to become acquainted with modern trends in painting. Duchamp studied Fauvism, Cubism, and Impressionism, and was captivated by new approaches to color and structure. He related above all to the Cubist notion of reordering reality, rather than simply representing it. His early paintings, such as Nude Descending A Staircase (1912), illustrate Duchamp's interest in machinery and its connection to the body's movement through space, implicit in early Modernism. However, Duchamp was most attracted to avant-garde notions of the artist as an anti-academic, and felt an affinity in this respect with one of his early heroes, the Symbolist painter and graphic artist, Odilon Redon. Early in his career, Duchamp developed a taste for the mysterious allure of Symbolist subject matter, such as the woman as elusive femme fatale. This deep-seated interest in the themes and exploration of sexual identity and desire would lead Duchamp toward Dadaism and Surrealism.

Mature period

In 1911, the twenty-five-year-old Marcel Duchamp met Francis Picabia, and the following year attended a theater adaptation of Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique with Picabia and Guillaume Apollinaire. This experience, and Roussel's inventive plots and puns in particular, made a deep impression on Duchamp. He noted that, for the first time, he "felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter." This interest in cross-genre pollination would become one of the underlying ideas of Dada, as would his outright rejection of a conventional artistic path.

Duchamp devoted seven years - 1915 to 1923 - to planning and executing one of his two major works, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass. This installation of machinery wedged between glass panels was Duchamp's first "aesthetic manifesto," marking his rejection of outmoded painterly obsessions with pleasing the eye (in a theory he called the "Retinal Shudder"). His series of readymades also sought to redefine art, or at least to question what art was. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass thematically investigated eroticism and desire, which was typical of Duchamp's oeuvre. The work served as a gateway to his later found-object sculptures and facsimile publications.

Later Years

In 1915, Duchamp immigrated to New York, and while finishing his Bride, conceived and manufactured several readymades. By signing them, Duchamp laid claim to found objects, such as a snow shovel, a urinal, or bicycle wheels. These objects, tied symbolically to themes of desire, eroticism and childhood memory, were designed to show the absurdity of canonizing avant-garde art practice. As Surrealism became popular in France, Duchamp traveled between New York and Paris, participating in printed textual projects, sculptural installations, and collaborations in all mediums with Dadaists and Surrealists. As of 1920, Duchamp adopted an alternate female persona, Rrose Selavy, to fully explore ideas of sexual identity. He continued to make readymades and exhibited his famous Bottle Rack series - an edition of eight bottle racks signed by Duchamp - in 1936. Wary of sensationalism following the Bottle Rack display, Duchamp secluded himself and befriended a tight-knit group of artists, including Man Ray, who photographed Duchamp many times throughout his life. For over twenty years, Duchamp labored in complete secrecy at his second masterwork, Etant donnes, an elaborate, sexualized diorama (the work is currently permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). He shunned the public eye, preferring instead to play chess with select guests until his death in 1968.

MARCEL DUCHAMP LEGACY

After he withdrew from the art world, Duchamp remained a passive, if influential, presence in New York avant-garde circles until he was rediscovered in the 1950s by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Duchamp's insistence that art should be an expression of the mind rather than the eye or the hand spoke to Minimalists and Conceptual artists alike. It ushered in a new era summed up by Joseph Kosuth's claim that "all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually." The seminal concept of the mass-produced readymade was eagerly seized upon not only by Andy Warhol and other Pop artists who claimed Duchamp as their founding father but also, owing to its performative aspects, by Fluxus, Arte Povera and Performance artists. Duchamp's radical critique of art institutions made him a cult figure for generations of artists who, like him, refused to go down the path of a conventional, commercial artistic career. Though his work was admired for its wide-ranging use of artistic materials and mediums, it is the theoretical thrust of Duchamp's eclectic but relatively limited output that accounts for his growing impact on successive waves of twentieth-century avant-garde movements and individual artists who openly acknowledged his influence.

MARCEL DUCHAMP QUOTES

On his attitude about art: "It is paradoxical. It is almost schizophrenic. On one side I worked from a very intellectual form of activity, and on the other de-deifying everything by more materialistic thoughts."

On the readymade: "The readymade is the consequence of the refusal which made me say: There are so many people who make pictures with their hands, that one should end up not using the hand."

On chess: "I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art, and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."

INFLUENCES

Marcel Duchamp Influences

Interactive chart with Marcel Duchamp's main influencers, and the people and ideas that the artist influenced in turn.

STAY INFORMED:

Connect with Art Story to get the significant news and keep track of the important exhibitions end events in modern art. We send a newsletter to our email list on a quarterly basis, but we update the Facebook and Twitter feeds much more regularly.

Edouard Manet was a French painter and a prominent figure in the mid-nineteenth-century Realist movement of French art. Manet's paintings are considered among the first works of art in the modern era, due to his rough painting style and absence of idealism in his figures. Manet was a close friend of and major influence on younger artists who founded Impressionism such as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Edouard Manet

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse was a French painter and sculptor who helped forge modern art. From his early Fauvist works to his late cutouts, he emphasized expansive fields of color, the expressive potential of gesture, and the sensuality inherent in art-making. Henri Matisse

Pablo Picasso

Picasso dominated European painting in the first half of the last century, and remains perhaps the century's most important, prolifically inventive, and versatile artist. Alongside Georges Braque, he pioneered Cubism. He also made significant contributions to Surrealist painting and media such as collage, welded sculpture, and ceramics. Pablo Picasso

Georges Braque

Georges Braque was a modern French painter who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed analytic Cubism and Cubist collage in the early twentieth century. Georges Braque

André Breton

André Breton, author of the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, was an influential theorizer of both Dada and Surrealism. Born in France, he emigrated to New York during World War II, where he greatly influenced the Abstract Expressionists. André Breton

Man Ray was an American artist in Paris whose photograms, objects, drawings, and other works played an important role in Dada, Surrealism, modern photography, and avant-garde art at large. Man Ray

Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire was a French writer and art critic who in the early twentieth century was a member of the avant-garde group of artists based in the Montparnasse community of Paris, which included Picasso, André Breton and Henri Rousseau. He is credited with coining the term "Surrealism."

Francis Picabia was a French artist who worked in Dada, Surrealist, and abstract modes, often employing language and mechanical imagery. He published the Dada journal 391 in Barcelona and America. Francis Picabia

Impressionism

A movement in painting that first surfaced in France in the 1860s, it sought new ways to describe effects of light and movement, often using rich colors. The Impressionists were drawn to modern life and often painted the city, but they also captured landscapes and scenes of middle-class leisure-taking in the suburbs. Impressionism

Fauvism

Fauvism was an early twentieth-century art movement founded by Henri Matisse and André Derain. Labeled as "wild beasts", Fauve artists favored vibrant colors and winding gestural strokes across the canvas. Fauvism

Cubism

Cubism was developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1907-1911, and it continued to be highly influential long after its decline. This classic phase has two stages: 'Analytic', in which forms seem to be 'analyzed' and fragmented; and 'Synthetic', in which pre-existing materials such as newspaper and wood veneer are collaged to the surface of the canvas. Cubism

Futurism

Futurism was the most influential Italian avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. Dedicated to the modern age, it celebrated speed, movement, machinery and violence. At first influenced by Neo-Impressionism, and later by Cubism, some of its members were also drawn to mass culture and nontraditional forms of art. Futurism

Symbolism

Symbolism is an artistic and literary movement that first emerged in France in the 1880s. In the visual arts it is often considered part of Post-Impressionism. It is characterized by an emphasis on the mystical, romantic and expressive, and often by the use of symbolic figures. Symbolism

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was an American Pop artist best known for his prints and paintings of consumer goods, celebrities, and photographed disasters. One of the most famous and influential artists of the 1960s, he pioneered compositions and techniques that emphasized repetition and the mechanization of art. Andy Warhol

Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns is an American artist who rose to prominence in the late 1950s for his multi-media constructions, dubbed by critics as Neo-Dada. Johns' work, including his world-famous targets and American flags series, were important predecessors to Pop art. Jasper Johns

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg, a key figure in early Pop art, admired the textural quality of Abstract Expressionism but scorned its emotional pathos. His famous "Combines" are part sculpture, part painting, and part installation. Robert Rauschenberg

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons is an American sculptor, painter and Neo-Pop artist, best known for mirror-finished stainless steel constructions of animals and everyday objects. Koons' works are often large public installations, in which viewers are invited to interact with his art.

Damien Hirst is a British installation and conceptual artist, and in the 1980s was a founding member of the Young British Artists (YBAs). His best known work is Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), comprised of a dead tiger shark suspended in a vitrine of formaldehyde.

Peggy Guggenheim, the neice of Solomon R. Guggenheim, was a collector, patron, and eclectic personality deeply connected to modern art. She gave important exhibitions to many Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist artists at her Art of This Century gallery in New York in the 1940s. Peggy Guggenheim

John Cage

John Cage was an American composer and conceptual artist who incorporated chance, silence, and environmental effects into his performances. An important art theorist, he influenced choreographers, musicians, and the Fluxus artists of the 1970s. John Cage

Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg was one the leading American art critics during the twentieth century. Best known as the ideological counterpart to Harold Rosenberg, Greenberg was a formalist who coined the terms "American-type painting" and 'Post-painterly abstraction.' He was a staunch champion of pure abstraction, including the work of Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still and Hans Hofmann. Clement Greenberg

Dada

Dada was an artistic and literary movement that emerged in 1916. It arose in reaction to World War I, and the nationalism and rationalism that many thought had led to the War. Influenced by several avant-gardes - Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Expressionism - its output was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting and collage. Emerging first in Zurich, it spread to cities including Berlin, Hanover, Paris, New York and Cologne. Dada

Surrealism

Perhaps the most influential avant-garde movement of the century, Surrealism was founded in Paris in 1924 by a small group of writers and artists who sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Much influenced by Freud, they believed that the conscious mind repressed the power of the imagination. Influenced also by Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution. Surrealism

Pop Art

British artists of the 1950s were the first to make popular culture the dominant subject of their art, and this idea became an international phenomenon in the 1960s. But the Pop art movement is most associated with New York, and artists such as Andy Warhol, who broke with the private concerns of the Abstract Expressionists, and turned to themes which touched on public life and mass society. Pop Art

Installation Art

Installation art is a genre of contemporary art-making in which two- and three-dimensional materials are used to transform a particular site. Installations may include sculptural, found, sound-based, and performance elements, and can be permanent or ephemeral.

Conceptual art describes an influential movement that first emerged in the mid-1960s and prized ideas over the formal or visual components of traditional works of art. The artists often challenged old concepts such as beauty and quality; they also questioned the conventional means by which the public consumed art; and they rejected the conventional art object in favor of diverse mediums, ranging from maps and diagrams to texts and videos. Conceptual Art

Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon was a French Symbolist artist whose paintings, prints, and pastel works frequently include elements like cyclopses, centaurs, and abstract floral designs in atmospheric settings.

Minimalism emerged as a movement in New York in the 1960s, its leading figures creating objects which blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture, and were characterized by unitary, geometric forms and industrial materials. Emphasizing cool anonymity over the passionate expression of the previous generation of painters, the Minimalists attempted to avoid metaphorical associations, symbolism, and suggestions of spiritual transcendence. Minimalism

Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth is an American conceptual artist, philosopher and essayist. His most celebrated work is One and Three Chairs (1965), which doubles as a piece of commentary on Plato's Theory of Forms. He is likewise well-known for his 1969 essay "Art after Philosophy," considered a key text of postmodern art writing. Joseph Kosuth

Fluxus

Fluxus was an international network of "intermedia" artists of the 1960s who worked in fields ranging from music to performance to the visual arts. Taking their name from the Latin "to flow," Fluxus artists adopted an often anarchic and satirical approach to conventional forms of art, and their ideas paved the way for Conceptual art. Fluxus

Arte Povera

Arte Povera - "poor art" or "impoverished art" - was the most influential European avant-garde of the 1960s. It numbered around a dozen Italian artists who often used commonplace materials that evoked a pre-industrial age - earth, rocks, clothing, paper and rope. The artists rejected abstract painting, and the references to modernity and technology in American Minimalism, and instead made sculpture which pointed to the past, and to experiences of locality. Arte Povera

Performance Art

Performance is a genre in which art is presented "live," usually by the artist but sometimes with collaborators or performers. It has had a role in avant-garde art throughout the twentieth century, playing an important part in anarchic movements such as Futurism and Dada. It particularly flourished in the 1960s, when Performance artists became preoccupied with the body, but it continues to be an important aspect of art practice. Performance Art

Nude Descending A Staircase

Title:Nude Descending A Staircase (1912)

Artwork Description & Analysis:Nude Descending A Staircase initially met with an unfavorable response at the Salon des Indépendants, dominated by the Cubist avant-garde who objected to what they deemed as its Futurist leanings, but enjoyed a succes de scandale at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. More than a study of the body's movement through space, the work is an early figurative exercise in painting cinematically, akin to Eadweard Muybridge's sequences of photographs that anticipated motion pictures. This painting together with the contemporaneous Passage from Virgin to Bride marks the end of Duchamp's short-lived career as a painter.

Artwork Description & Analysis: Art takes on a scientific guise in this intricate piece whose several component parts are neatly displayed alongside or slotted into a bespoke wooden case. To make this piece, which reads like a visual demonstration of the workings of chance, Duchamp dropped three threads, each exactly one meter long, from a height of one meter. He then carefully recorded the random outline of the fallen thread on canvas, glass and wood. Chance also dictated his choice of title: Duchamp apparently hit upon stoppages, French for the "invisible mending" of a garment, after walking past a shop sign advertising sewing supplies.

Mixed media - The Museum of Modern Art

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass

Title:The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass (1915-1923)

Artwork Description & Analysis:The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass was partly inspired by author Raymond Roussel's use of homophones, words that sound alike but have different meanings. Duchamp frequently resorted to puns and double-meanings in his work.With The Large Glass, he sought to make an artwork that could be both visually experienced and "read" as a text. After attending a performance of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique, Duchamp envisioned a sculptural assemblage as a stage of sorts. Preliminary studies for this stage, which would have been over nine feet tall, included depictions of an abstracted "bride" being attacked by machine-like figures in chaotic motion. The constructed gadgetry featured between the two glass panels was also likely inspired by Duchamp's study of mathematician Henri Poincare's physics theorems.

Mixed media - Philadelphia Museum of Art

Fountain

Title:Fountain (1917)

Artwork Description & Analysis: The most notorious of the readymades, Fountain was submitted to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists under the pseudonym R. Mutt. The initial R stood for Richard, French slang for "moneybags" whereas Mutt referred to JL Mott Ironworks, the New York-based company, which manufactured the porcelain urinal. After the work had been rejected by the Society on the grounds that it was immoral, critics who championed it disputed this claim, arguing that an object was invested with new significance when selected by an artist for display. Testing the limits of what constitutes a work of art, Fountain staked new grounds. What started off as an elaborate prank designed to poke fun at American avant-garde art, proved to be one of most influential artworks of the 20th century.

Urinal - Philadelphia Museum of Art

L.H.O.O.Q

Title:L.H.O.O.Q (1919)

Artwork Description & Analysis: Marcel Duchamp's scandalous L.H.O.O.Q is an altered postcard reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. For this "assisted" (which implied a degree of manipulation as opposed to the "unassisted") readymade, Duchamp penciled a moustache and a goatee over Mona Lisa's upper lip and chin, and re-titled the artwork. The title riffs on the French pronunciation of the letters, "Elle a chaud au cul," which roughly translates as "She has a hot ass." Rather than transmuting an ordinary, manufactured object into a work of art, as in the bulk of his readymades, in L.H.O.O.Q Duchamp starts with the representation of an iconic masterpiece that he takes down from its pedestal by playfully debunking it. In endowing the Mona Lisa with masculine attributes, he alludes to Leonardo's purported homosexuality and gestures at the androgynous nature of creativity. Duchamp is clearly concerned here with gender role-reversals, which later come to the fore in Man Ray's portraits of the artist dressed as his female alter ego, Rrose Selavy.

Collotype - Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Fresh Widow

Title:Fresh Widow (1920)

Artwork Description & Analysis: This miniature model of a traditional French window was made to Duchamp's specifications by a carpenter in New York. The title, inscribed at the base along with the words "COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920," would have been an obvious pun in the aftermath of World War I, which turned many a lusty or "fresh" young spouse into a widow. (Incidentally, the work marks the debut of Duchamp's feminine alter ego, Rose Selavy.) As if to signal mourning, the eight windowpanes are covered in black polished leather, which fully blocks out the view, thus playing havoc with the notion of painting as a window onto the world.

Painted wood, glass, leather - Tate Modern, London

Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics)

Title:Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) (1925)

Artwork Description & Analysis: Duchamp's known aversion for what he termed "retinal art" did not prevent him from conducting optical experiments by means of kinetic sculptures such as this one (though he refused to consider them as artworks). Based on an earlier model Duchamp and Man Ray had experimented with in 1920, Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) consists of a white papier-mache globe mounted on a velvet-lined disk that calls to mind the rings of Saturn. The globe is covered with black concentric circles arranged to form a spiral that appears to pulsate when spinning. Engraved on a copper ring around the globe's circumference, the inscription "RROSE SELAVY ET MOI ESQUIVONS LES ECCHYMOSES DES ESQUIMAUX AUX MOTS EXQUIS," ("Rrose Selavy and I dodge the Eskimos' bruises with exquisite words.") When pronounced in French, the phrase wittily conveys the hypnotic visual effect verbally through a complex of echoing sounds.

Mixed media - The Museum of Modern Art

La Boite-en-Valise (Box in a Suitcase)

Title:La Boite-en-Valise (Box in a Suitcase) (1935 - 1941)

Artwork Description & Analysis: Like a traveling salesman's kit, this Boite-en-Valise (Box in a Suitcase) is one of twenty-four editions of a leather case that contains sixty-nine miniature reproductions of Duchamp's artworks. Each box offered different, hand-colored art pieces affixed to the lid's inside. Sections in the boxes slide out and unfold to show prints mounted on black board. This work exemplifies the lack of boundary between original and reproduction that Duchamp developed with his readymades. The box also functions as a portable museum: Duchamp made it for his move to New York in 1942, and included selections of his work made up to that date. La Boite-en-Valise calls to mind André Malraux's "museum without walls," not least in its use of photographic reproductions.

Mixed media - Fogg Museum

Etant donnes

Title:Etant donnes (1946-66)

Artwork Description & Analysis: Installed behind a heavy wooden door that was found in Spain and shipped to New York, Etant donnes consists of a diorama viewed through two eyeholes. The scene depicts a nude woman, possibly dead, with her legs splayed, holding an illuminated gas lamp. A mountainous landscape, based on a photo Duchamp shot in Switzerland, creates the background setting. Built in secret over a period of more than twenty years, Etant donnes is considered Duchamp's second major work. He made an entire manual for its installation, which is reproduced in facsimile and available in print. At first glance, Etant donnes is a direct reference to Courbet's painting, Origine du Monde (1866). Yet upon closer consideration, the piece can be viewed as a reflection on the boundaries between artist and spectator, as a means to question self-consciousness, or as a meditation on spiritual purpose through the symbolism of a lit lamp.

Painted wood, latex, and fabric - Philadelphia Museum of Art

Priere de Toucher (Please Touch)

Title:Priere de Toucher (Please Touch) (1947)

Artwork Description & Analysis:Priere de Toucher (Please Touch) was designed by Duchamp to accompany the seminal 1947 International Surrealist exhibition he co-curated with André Breton. For the limited edition of the exhibition catalogue, Duchamp and the Surrealist artist Enrico Donati hand-colored 999 foam rubber "falsies," or false breasts, to glue onto black velvet which adhered to the removable book covers. This catalogue, the exhibition it was based on, and a future exhibition on which Duchamp and Breton collaborated yet again, "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme (1959-60)," mark Duchamp's thematic overlap with the Surrealists, namely an obsession with eroticism.

Book with latex breast - Philadelphia Museum of Art

Bibliography

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing this page.
These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.